I heard that about GNOME 3.x, but then I actually got around to using it. It didn't have a user switch feature I liked. I just share a computer amongst my family so a fast user switch that listed users and didn't have to go through passwords is fine ... and no longer a provided option.

So I decided to see if there really was anything I could do about it via extensions. I spent a little time researching -- mostly learning javascript, which I didn't know at the time, and a tutorial on how to write extensions. From there is was surprisingly easy to write something that did exactly what I wanted, complete with polling DBUS for a user list. It was the sort of thing I never would have been able to do in GNOME2 if it lacked a feature I wanted: I would have had to hack and recompile code for applets or some such.

To be honest GNOME3 reminded me of the old FVWM days -- you could make it do pretty much anything you wanted if you were willing to roll up your sleeves a little and muck with configuration/scripting. There's a wealth of extreme customisability exposed, it just doesn't have pointy-clicky buttons (you know just like back in the FVWM days when you customised stuff with emacs and .fvwmrc).

I've seen a demo that forwarded individual windows, and moreover managed to move and duplicate the single window over a couple of displays -- like xmove, but working (xmove never worked well, and is unmaintained now), with bonus features. Wayland will have these things in due course.

If he is a US citizen it doesn't matter if he lives in the US or not; he's required to file, including all the foreign bank accounts (even if they are just usual bank accounts for your country of residence. Thus they are just as able to snoop for tax cheats.

A hard limit on the amount? Yes. A hard limit on the value? Not even close. The amount of bitcoins has gone up slowly, but the value has ballooned (or bubbled if you like), and there's no limit on that bubble other than when the hoarders decide to cash out. At that point bitcoins will suffer a brief period of hyperinflation before the hoarding starts again and the whole process repeats.

The type to search applications feature searches more than just application names -- it searches a number of fields in the .desktop files, including application descriptions. Thus a search for "spreadsheet" will bring up LibreOffice Calc for example. Type what you want to do, and you'll find what you want ... that's the theory.

Really? You're on such thin ice at your job that a comment and/or photo on the internet by some random person is going to get you fired? Either you suck at your job, your employer sucks, or you're making several mountain ranges out of a molehill.

Yes, someone lost their job in this incident, but given that only one of the two male developers involved were fired I presume there's rather more detail here that we're not privy to. Did Adria over-react? Yes. But let's be honest: all she really did was complain about some people on the internet. She didn't demand they be fired, she didn't try and DDoS their company, etc. She did a thoughtless thing without considering the consequences -- you know, kind of like loudly making crude jokes in mixed company is a thoughtless thing that doesn't consider the consequences. Over-reacting to her particular stupid mistake is just as stupid as her own over-reaction to the guys stupid mistake. How about we all just grow up and move on.

I got provided with 2 24" widescreen monitors, which gives pemty of screen real-estate, but makes for very wide anglew viewing. After a period of frustration with panning my eyes across the width of them I realised I could orient them vertically since they were on rotatable mounts. This turned out to be great -- the extra height fits more lines of code on screen at a time, and works nicely dual screen. I reccomend such a setup to anyone.

I'm sure some bitcoins will remain in circulation, and they will get divided into ever finer fractions to provide the requisite liquidity to be a currency at the scale they wish to be. Then eventually the deflation will have gone far enough that a hoarder will decide to cash out. Then, when everyone has been trading in .0001 bitcoins, they'll sell their 1000 bitcoins for a lot of cash and bitcoins will suffer from a sudden massive bout of inflation as the money supply expands by orders of magnitude in an uncontrolled fashion. Then the deflation will kick in again until ...

All the bitcoin fanatics saying that deflation is good and inflation is the root of all evil ... they're missing the point: bitcoin is going to suffer from inflation, just a sudden unpredictable rampant uncontrolled bursts -- and that's the inflation that really sucks. Slow, small scale predictable controlled inflation can be accepted, large scale unpredictable uncontrolled inflation is what causes panics, crashes and economic mayhem.

A currency that increases in size slower than the economy using that currency is still deflationary. Yes, there is an increasing amount of the currency available, but the demand for the currency outstrips that. Sure, bitcoin could be inflationary right now, presuming that it only ever traded for the same fixed value of goods and services it is used for right now. I don't think such a non-growth strategy is what bitcoin is after though.

I think what is missed here is Brook's maxim "build one to throw away". Sure, sometimes you need to actually build something to figure out what its for, or what it should be. That's an important step in engineering. The hard part is to take the next step and be willing to throw all of that away so you can build a good version. It's hard because often it took a large amount of work to get that first version doing all the things you slowly realised it needed to be able to do. Its worth it because, if you were paying attention, you also learned all the ways in which you built it badly the first time that can all be fixed with those difficulties in mind from the outset.

Throwing out working code is often bad. But if you start with the mentality that you are building it to throw away -- to learn what it can do, what it should do, and how best to structure things so it will do it -- then its easier to take that step and start again with the knowledge you gained.

In mathematics, however, everything is typeset in LaTeX, and the journals all provide a LaTeX style file, or document class for you to use. Papers are all formatted exactly as the journal wishes by the authors of the paper at the time of submission.

I agree that the model proposed in TFA doesn't work for all cases quite as easily, but in the math world it is definitely very practicable.

No, there isn't ... but there's nothing that encourages it either. And perl has a elatively high congitive load in terms of all the many subtle features and idioms that you need to keep track of. If you're reading code that only uses a subset of idioms and features that you're comfortable with it's fine, but it is relatively easy to end up outside your comfort zone with other people's code unless you are deeply invested in the language. In this way it is much like C++.

In practice however a lot of Perl's reputation for unreadability is historical, and cultural. Back when Perl was more popular there was very much a culture of "neat hacks", JAPHs and perl golf. That meant that a lot of Perl code you saw in examples was often cryptic, or revelled in terse complexity.

These days I think Haskell has taken the crown for the culture that produces terse, complex and cryptic code. There's nothing in Haskell that means it has to be hard to read, but a culture of showing off with terseness has developed and ...

That's a codebook, not a one time pad. They are distinctly different. Code books are theoretically crackable given sufficient ciphertext and a model for the plaintext (e.g. English). In practice "sufficient" ciphertext is never going to happen. One time pads are uncrackable in theory. In practice mistakes can be made that make them not true one time pads and thus potentially crackable (but that require multiple messages using the same pad -- not the case here).

He is mostly railing against deletionists, so what you need to do is look at articles nomiated for deletion on any given day and you'll get an idea. It's mostly stuff that's very obscure or out of place (in that it should probably be merged into a different article instead of having one all to itself). While I have some sympathy for anti-deletionists in that its not like Wikipedia is running out of storage space, mostly I find they are people who want to rule over their own little kingdom of obscure trivia. That is, they want to be the people they complain about (angry editors who firecely police and put down anyone who intervenes on articles), and are annoyed that no-one else has much interest in the small area of human knowledge over which they feel they command suitable authority.

I have lived and voted in two different countries that used hand counted handwritten ballots. There were never any problems, counts were efficient, and reliability was high (very close electorates/ridings had recounts only to arrive at suffciently close to the same totals to give a very high degree of confidence in the counting process). While both countries had smaller populations than the US as a whole they had populations comparable to individual states, and I see no reason the systems wouldn't scale.

The first key is to have a completely independent organisation that runs the elections. But really look at any number of countries around the world that have reliable elections with handwritten ballots.